On Nov 7, Ryan Culpepper wrote:
>> (Infamous Ryan-Analogy: There are two ways to increase social
> interaction. Encourage people to barge into others' personal spaces,
> or encourage everyone to spend more time in public spaces. I'm going
> for the latter.)
The mistake here is "collection" = "personal space", an equation that
fails in a spectacular way when a collection's owner dumps it and some
victim becomes its new owner.
> > See above. What needs fixing is for people to start looking
> > beyond their collections -- regardless of a new collection. (And
> > you can summarize my above concern as: if this is not fixed, then
> > we haven't done anything besides shuffle some code around -- so
> > now people still don't care, and the code is messier.)
>> Shuffling code around, when done carefully, is called *organizing*.
The shuffling in this case (at least IIUC) involves taking out random
bits of "looks like it's useful" code and moving it into a big
(parent-less) collection named "unorganized stuff".
[A better attempt at this kind of promotion path would to extend the
chain of `scheme/foo' -> `scheme/private/foo' for some `foo's: add new
list functions into `scheme/list-extra', and have all the extras
documented in an "Unstable Extras" manual. This way, the unstable
stuff is still organized according to functionality, and since the
code is in `foo-extra', then it's hint for `foo's owner that some
stuff might be good to add -- and if this comes with proper
documentation and tests then it's even easier to add.]
--
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:
http://barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!